


What Heroes Are For

by recrudescence



Category: Misfits
Genre: F/M, Theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:09:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our valiant posse finds itself with some spare time for once. They need a mission, Simon needs a gift, and nothing annihilates boredom quite like a little recreational shoplifting.</p><p>It can't possibly be that hard.</p><p>(Takes place after episode 7 of S3, but prior to the season finale.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Heroes Are For

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girlmarauders](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlmarauders/gifts).



> Loads of thanks to deepsix and eleveninches for giving some very helpful input, and also to anyone who dealt with all the tweets I unleashed on the world in the midst of my procrastination. <3

“It’s kind of nice,” said Rudy, the one who really did think everything was nice. He had a papaya smoothie in front of him and Curtis was still behind the bar, grousing that he couldn’t just go around handing out smoothies or people were gonna talk, right, and no one would want to go for a drink at a place that served up shit with umbrellas stuck in it. “Maybe we ought to just en—”

“It’s _boring_ is what it is,” interrupted the other Rudy. He tapped a toothpick against the lip of the bar and leveled a fish-eyed look at the rest of them like this was all some sort of enormous personal insult.

“Some of us have got to work,” pointed out Curtis, who liked to think he was pretty responsible when it really mattered. “It’s not like we have all the time in the world.” He gestured towards the rest of the pub to make his point, but the effect was lost somewhat since there was no one in it but them.

Rudy just sauntered around the bar and helped himself to a bottle of Stella. “And _some_ of us don’t have money to throw around, so we’re fucking bored.” He beamed at him and held out the bottle until Curtis snorted and popped it open for him. “Curtis here is a career man, really making something of himself, and Kelly’s got a big-time power-dealing boytoy.”

“He’s not a boytoy, dickhead,” Kelly said, with the distinct tone of someone who had repeated something too many times for there to be any real rancour left in it.

“And you,” Rudy rolled right on, rounding on Alisha and Simon, “what are you doing in your down time besides each other? I realise that must take up loads of time right there, but for the sake of…” He trailed off with that thought when Alisha sniggered, Simon frowned, and the two of them tilted their heads at him in unison like a pair of theatre masks.

“Well, go on,” urged the other Rudy, fiddling with his straw. “What have you even been doing?”

Alisha’s mouth was half open, but no words came out.

“Role-play games,” Simon said finally.

“Kinky shit!” Rudy trumpeted, raising his Stella.

“It’s a kind of online gaming,” Simon tried to explain, but Rudy was still chortling away.

“Anyone else got something to share?” Curtis asked.

The seconds ticked by.

“I need to get my sister a birthday present,” Simon ventured, and waited for someone to get a dirty double entendre out of that too.

The other Rudy looked absolutely delighted. “I love birthdays. What’ve you got in mind?”

Simon’s cheeks hollowed just a touch. “Ah. She wants an iPad.”

“Wait.” Alisha’s eyebrows were dangerously close to hitting her scalp. “Are you fucking serious? I thought she was turning fourteen.”

“She is. And she wants an iPad.”

“We could steal one,” Kelly suggested. “Unless you want to rob another bank. That could work, too.”

“Yeah,” said Curtis “that’s brilliant thinking. It’s not like we’ve got criminal records or nothing.”

Kelly shrugged. “I’m tired of being a superhero. Why can’t we be the bad guys this time? Shoplifting’s like nothing anyway, compared to everything else.”

“I don’t think good guys are supposed to have body counts as high as ours,” Curtis countered. The Rudy with the smoothie nodded, but his doppelganger shot him a glare before he could get a word in.

“I’m pretty sure Ellen Ripley would disagree with you,” said Simon.

Kelly’s sigh was impressively eloquent. “Look. We’ve got no probation worker at the moment, so we’re free to kill some time, yeah? That don’t mean we’ve gotta be pussies about it.”

And. Well.

When she put it like that, it really did make sense.

 

*

 

“This,” said Curtis, “is such bullshit.”

Kelly pulled her hat lower. Getting barred from Argos was one thing, but she wasn’t keen on making a habit of it in any other shops and there was a good chance the afternoon was going to end with at least one of them getting into some kind of shit. “Oh, I’m sorry, is Currys not exciting enough for you?”

“Not this the place, this the idea. It’s fucking stupid, all right?”

“Are you gonna explain why you’re whining or just whine some more?”

Curtis scowled at a display of fuzzy keychains. “Rudy’s still in the loo. He won’t come out.”

“What?”

“ _He_ won’t come out,” Curtis repeated, enunciating each word good and proper, and Kelly’s eyes widened under the brim of her cap.

“That’s not fucking on. We need him. Why not?”

“Dunno. Maybe he’s still a little pissed off about Rudy forgetting him at the detention centre that one time.”

“Fuck,” Kelly spat under her breath. “You’re right, this is bullshit. That was _one time_.”

“Let’s just buy a cake, I mean it. Can’t we just get Simon’s sister some of these?” He stopped poking at the keychains and pulled a few of them off the stand. “Hey, they’ve got little sheep on them and stuff; girls like that kind of thing, right?”

“You can’t be serious. Simon said this is the only thing she’s said she wants and you want to give her that shit? Remind me to never invite you to my birthday party.”

 

*

 

“Maybe,” Simon was saying, “we should forget the whole thing.”

He wasn’t quite having a crisis of ethics, since the five of them didn’t have very many ethics left to have crises over what with one thing and another, but something about being in an electronics megastore to steal his baby sister a gift seemed a little…off. Like when they’d had to put that zombie cat out of its misery and none of them could get together the nerve to do it. It just didn’t sit well.

“I mean,” he went on, “maybe I should just leave her out of this sort of thing. I could just find something I can actually pay for.”

Alisha, the embodiment of all the nonchalance that seemed determined to evade Simon, was looking at portable speakers. “What d’you mean, like it’s gonna be tainted somehow because it’s stolen? That’s silly, and she won’t know anyway. And even if she somehow _did_ , maybe she’d think it was kind of cool having a brother who’d do something like that just for her.”

“I'm not sure anyone thinks I'm cool,” Simon said logically.

Alisha swatted him on the arm without turning away from a display of portable DVD players. “If I were turning fourteen and my brother got me something as nice as an iPad, I’d be ecstatic. No girl would turn that down.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Unless she’s been a brat to you, but then you shouldn't be bending over backward for her at all.”

“Violet’s not a brat. She’s,” he paused, staring at the ceiling like it could supply him with the right word. “She’s _normal_.”

“You said, yeah.” Alisha ticked off each point on her fingers, reciting in singsong, “She makes top marks and she doesn’t screw around, she’s got a birthday that’s so close to Christmas you might as well get her something awesome, so why not?”

“I…guess so.”

“Honestly? She sounds boring as fuck, so the least you can do is make her life a little interesting. No offence.” She smiled and threaded her fingers through his. “Just tell your mum that technology’s very educational and she’ll be all over it too.”

“Well, we’re already leading lives of crime,” Simon admitted.

“For real, yeah?" Alisha sighed. "We’re not even killing anyone today. This is just something fun to see if we can pull it off. And it’s probably been _really_ dull for you lately, since you don’t have the suit anymore.”

“Right, no, absolutely,” Simon said, a little louder than he intended. Being pragmatic always came to him easily even if sociability didn’t. “Then we should probably go look in on Rudy and have him get started.”

Rudy was the one who had had the idea to begin with, suggesting he distract the security guards while Kelly disabled the security system itself and his other self nicked an iPad. The rest of them were just meant to wander about like regular shoppers in case they ended up needing damage control. _Undercover_ , Rudy and Rudy had said together, one of them gleeful and one of them uncertain.

Simon checked his phone as they crossed the store. “He hasn’t texted me. You?”

“No,” said Alisha, inclining her head towards the restrooms. “You reckon that means he’s still in the men’s?”

Simon’s brow furrowed. “Use your power?”

“If he really is in there, I'd rather not.”

“Okay.” Simon seemed to draw himself up a bit as he glanced at the door again. “Then I guess I should—”

“Fuck’s sake,” Alisha muttered, and pushed it open.

 

*

 

“We’re fucked,” Curtis announced, sounding quite calm about it. “It’s all gone to shit and we never even started.”

“Or not,” said Kelly, who had her purse on one of the sinks and was fixing her hair. “Look at him, it’s like he’s constipated.”

Alisha stared at Rudy, who was gripping the edge of another sink and apparently having a very intense standoff with his own reflection. “So? Just do your thing. Make him come out. What’s the holdup?”

“What am I,” Rudy demanded, “a fucking magician?” and frowned when everyone else, crowded together around the sinks, exchanged glances.

“Fucking say something already, anytime now,” he grumbled after a few tedious seconds of silence. “No pressure, don't you worry.”

Kelly gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Nah, mate, but we could use one of them right about now.”

 

*

 

Rudy cleared his throat. “Okay, Plan B is a go. Action!”

“Listen to this wanker,” snorted Kelly, and that was when the men’s room door swung open again.

The man in the doorway stopped in his tracks. “The fuck’s going on in here?”

“Why, hello there!” Rudy cried, striding over to him with outstretched arms. “So you’re here for the orgy, then?”

The stranger blinked, pulled a face, and quietly left.

Rudy grinned and studied his fingernails.

“We’re supposed to blending in,” Curtis reminded him. “You could have at least told him we’re…subverting the gender binary, something like that.”

“Fuck that, whatever it is. Let’s get moving, people, go on.”

Since his power was rebelling, all he was good for was cheerfully giving orders, but he was something of a natural at it.

They trooped out of the bathroom, making their way towards the door to the security office.

Plan B, slightly less ambitious than the now defunct Plan A, was to have Alisha chat up the security guards. Then Kelly could sneak into the back, disable the sensors and CCTV, and the others could nick an iPad from their stock and waltz right out the door with it—along with, Rudy pointed out, whatever else anyone happened to pick up on the way.

“What if they don’t want to talk to you?” Curtis murmured to Alisha, eyeing the pair of guards prating away at each other in the doorway.

“Oh, they’ll talk to me,” she said calmly, peering into the mirrored surface of a screen protector and straightening the bow on her headband.

“What if one of them’s gay, did you think of that? “

Alisha narrowed her eyes. “God, you’re shit at positive thinking. Go fuck yourself, yeah? Oh, wait a minute; you already have.”

To Curtis's horror, she and Rudy actually bumped fists.

Curtis crossed his arms. “Fine. Do what you want, but don’t be upset if it doesn’t work.”

 

*

 

It actually got off to a good start. Alisha could get anyone to open up; that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that she didn’t stop.

Kelly was standing one aisle away, trying to look casual in a ninja sort of way as opposed to an I’m-going-to-hijack-your-whole-system-as-soon-as-you-fucking-move way, but Alisha was still jabbering on with both of the guards nonstop. And it wasn’t even about shopping or anything that would get them following her away from the fucking door; it was about the most _stupid_ things, like what kind of eyeliner she preferred.

Her phone buzzed with a new message, which turned out to be Curtis texting her to say that he was over in the computer area with Rudy and could they please hurry it along?

Kelly texted back for them to shut up and be patient, then went right on very impatiently waiting for Alisha to change the subject or ask the guards to come help her out with something, whatever would get them out of the way. Another couple minutes went by and it was starting to seem like she never would.

“God, I know!” Alisha was laughing and rattling on about some season of Big Brother, which was just a fucking ridiculous thing to be discussing _now_ , in Kelly’s opinion.

After another few very obnoxious minutes of this, Kelly sent her a text out of pure exasperation.

“Something important?” one of the guards asked then, which Kelly assumed meant Alisha was reading the message.

“It’s from my friend; she says we need to get a move on because of Curtis and the Rudies,” Alisha said brightly.

Hidden behind the shelves, Kelly dropped her face into one fuchsia-manicured hand.

The other oik in the Currys security uniform sounded nonplussed. “Is that, what, some indie rock group?”

“No, they’re a couple of our other friends,” Alisha explained. “It’s brilliant, one of them can—”

Kelly strode forward and grabbed her wrist, muttering, “C’mon, I’ve gotta pee,” through tightly clenched teeth before practically dragging her away.

“Do you even know what you’re doing?” she demanded as soon as they were out of earshot.

Alisha was staring at her like _she_ was the one acting like she’d gone mental. “Excuse me? I was chatting them up like I was supposed to. What are _you_ doing?”

“Saving your arse,” Kelly said matter-of-factly, and sent another text. “It’s a power thing, it’s gotta be. Or did you mean to start telling them all about this brilliant plan we’ve got that involves robbing the fucking shop?”

“I did not,” snapped Alisha. “I was only going to…” she stopped, uncertainty overtaking her face. “Or at least I _think_ I…”

“It’s a truth power,” Kelly interjected. “Something like that, it’s got to be. And I really don’t have the time for this shit.”

“Fuck. Hang on.” Alisha was already phoning Simon. “Hey, one of the security guards can make people tell the truth if they’re close enough,” she explained in an undertone. “Or we think he can, anyway. Maybe. Me and Kelly are about to test it.”

There was only one guard at the security office when they returned to it, which made things a lot more convenient but was still fucking annoying. “This shit had better not still be working someone’s going to get a smack,” Alisha groused. She was starting to think maybe it would have been easier just to have Rudy throw a speaker at the guards and make them chase him around the store. “Maybe it only lasts as long as you’re near him?”

Kelly leveled her gaze at the one remaining guard, who was facing the opposite direction. “Go over there, act like you’re looking at something you want to buy, then look at me and the first thing that pops into your head. Then we’ll know if it’s him or the other guy.”

After doing exactly that, the first thing that popped into Alisha’s head and out of her mouth happened to be, “That makeup does look really fucking weird on you and I don't know how Seth deals with it.”

Kelly rolled her eyes.

Alisha was already cringing and moving away from the guard. “Shit. I didn’t expect that.”

“Told you so,” Kelly said with a bit of a smirk. “Powers. That’s exactly the kind of shit I used to hear you thinking about me, you know.”

“Maybe you could ring Seth?" Alisha suggested. "He has to have something we can use.” She sighed. “Our powers are kind of shit for this one, aren’t they?”

“Dunno if I should, he said he’s lending his mum a hand with something for her church.”

“That is such bullshit,” Alisha said flatly. “He deals superpowers and he can’t do us a solid because he’s helping his _mum_?”

“I think it’s kind of nice,” Kelly shrugged.

Alisha did a double take. “This whole thing is getting really weird.”

 

*

 

All of them ended back up in the restroom—the ladies’ this time, just in case anyone else had heard about the orgy in the men’s.

“We need Seth, I’m telling you.” Alisha was practically whining. “I am not spending all day in here.”

“What we really need,” Curtis said, “is for another storm to come, you know? And then everyone switches powers again.”

Simon stopped eyeing the door long enough to flick an amused glance at him. “I think you’re still disappointed because all you can do is raise zombies.”

“Really, you think?” As options went, switching powers somehow honestly did seem like the best one. “Maybe we could sneak up on him and knock him out.”

Simon shook his head. “The whole point of this is _not_ getting in trouble for once. I don't feel like getting an ASBO for taking down a Currys worker.” He smiled at Alisha, who was looking sulky. “Let's just go for a drink and I'll pick something up on the way.”

“Nah, fuck this,” Rudy grabbed Kelly’s phone. “We start it, we finish it. I’ll talk to him.”

And somehow, even with Kelly chasing him and rattling at the door of the stall he darted into, he actually managed to do it. “Oi, Seth, we need you at the Currys megastore. It’s important. Kelly’s in trouble, man.”

“I am not in trouble!” Kelly shouted through the stall. “Don’t listen to him.”

Rudy’s head popped over the top of it. Apparently he was standing on the toilet. “Yeah, you hear all the yelling?” He twisted his face into a melodramatic look of concern and winked at Kelly’s scowling face. “It’s fucking scary over here, you get me? We really need you. See you very soon; cheers!”

“You’re such a wanker,” Kelly informed him when he glided back out of the stall.

“I deny nothing.” Rudy dropped the phone back into her hand with a monarchal air. “But I can’t help but notice you’re not trying to call back and set him straight.”

She laughed. “Yeah, well. It’s something to do, right?”

 

*

 

“You’re trying to what?”

“We’re trying to do a good deed,” Alisha piped up. “You can’t believe that, really?”

“No, not really,” Seth replied. They were back to wandering the store and trying to seem like regular customers, so he was pretending to avidly examine a toaster. “I wish I could say that I can’t believe you dragged me over here just because you’re crap at organized crime, but...”

“This wasn’t part of the plan,” Simon said. “You don’t have to stay—”

“Unless you want his poor sister crying herself to sleep every night because of you,” Alisha finished.

Seth’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t stop surveying the toasters.

Kelly looked him up and down for about the hundredth time. “Were you doing something important?”

He was wearing track pants and a t-shirt, both covered in paint spatters. “My mum needed some help getting her church all done up for a celebration. Unitarians like a little bit of everything when they have a party.”

Kelly was about to say that it sounded like the kind of thing that an organisation might rent the community centre for. It also sounded exactly like the kind of thing their last probation worker would have just loved drafting them all into with a spiel about how they were trying to be all-inclusive or some shit so they’d all better keep the place decent and start serving punch. “You look nice,” she said instead. “In a homeless kind of way, like.”

“I need to swap out my power,” Curtis blurted out before Seth could reply to that. “Every power I get sucks more than the last one. They’ve got to start going back up again eventually. Did you sell my last one already?”

“A couple times, but it always got traded back in for some reason or another. I can give it back to you, but you might not like it any more than you did the first time.”

“Sounds about right. Come on. We need to get Plan C off the ground here.”

 

*

 

Plan C was essentially a soap opera that involved Curtis using his old power to turn into a girl and then cause a diversion by pretending to keel over.

“That way,” Simon was saying, as close to animated as he ever came, “it won’t matter if anyone gets close to the security guard with the truth power since everyone can honestly say they have no idea where this girl came from or what’s wrong with her. And no one will be able to identify Curtis since he’ll be a person who doesn’t even exist.”

Rudy thought it was hilarious. “That’s fucking perfect. Tell me again why it took us this long to think of it?”

Nobody acknowledged that.

“Then I just wait till they’re done taking my pulse or whatever, make sure you’ve all left already, and I walk right out of the place before the CCTV’s back on. It’s like some magic show thing where the guy disappears.” Curtis shook his head, a crooked grin on his face. “Nathan would be all over this.”

“Nathan’s a dick,” Kelly declared as Seth reached to take hold of Curtis’s arm. “He keeps emailing me about writing him plans for shit like machines that can saw people in half and then stick them back together.”

Seth raised an eyebrow. “What the hell is he on?”

“He says he can pitch the idea to a casino or something and get them to loan him the money to have it built.”

“And then what?”

“Then,” Kelly spread her hands theatrically, “he’ll have the greatest show anyone’s ever seen and be able to buy himself a chunk of Hawaii to live on with Marnie and the baby.”

“He sounds like a psycho,” Rudy said with a little grimace of disdain. “Did you say you’d do it?”

“No, because it’s fucking stupid and he’s a _dick_. Now he keeps asking me why I don’t want Marnie’s baby to grow up on a gorgeous island and all this guilt-trip shit.”

“Maybe you should him you’ll do it as long as you get a cut of all the profits.” Alisha was nodding like this was a distinct possibility, like they were just that desperate for some kind of income. “If it even works, I mean.”

“Of course it’ll work,” said Seth. “She’s a fucking rocket scientist, didn’t you know?”

Kelly tossed her head. “Bloody right I am. I can _make_ it work.”

“Just make the CCTV _not_ work for now, all right?” Curtis was still standing across from Seth, arm extended. “Then we can talk about letting Nathan provide for you.”

“You don’t need to sound so worried,” Alisha huffed. “It’ll be easy this time.”

“Great, whatever.” Curtis didn’t feel or sound remotely convinced, but he nodded anyway. “Now let’s do this.”

He extended his arm and Seth gripped it.

 

*

 

It really was just that easy.

Rudy did an award-winning job of wringing his hands and making a scene, going on about how they couldn’t just leave a poor defenceless girl there in the middle of the floor, could they? He disappeared as soon as security started towards Curtis, then went on to fill his pockets with anything he could lay his hands on, which happened to involve quite a few of the fluffy keychains Curtis had glowered at earlier because it turned out there weren’t many items that he could actually fit in his pockets to begin with.

Curtis, if anyone were to ask him, would say he deserved an award of his own for not breaking down and laughing until he’d made it out the door and ducked into an alley to change back into himself.

Hacking the sensors and security feeds took Kelly a grand total of ten seconds and then she was back on the floor where Seth had been waiting for her. “Hurry up, before they get their shit together. You should pick something you want. Call it a Christmas present since Morocco didn’t happen.” She picked a neatly packaged smartphone off a shelf and passed it to him.

Seth put it aside. “I don’t need a new phone.”

“Pick something else, then. Or give it to your mum. Or sell it and get some new trainers.” The ones he had on were ragged beneath their stains and paint spatters.

Seth puffed out his chest. “These are straight-up Primani, I’ll have you know.

“Jesus, you just shouldn’t talk sometimes,” said Kelly, and kissed him.

A few aisles over, Simon and Alisha did the same and then proceeded to walk through the store entrance with a boxed iPad shoved into Simon’s shoulder bag.

 

*

 

“You can’t just mix it all together like that. It clashes.”

Simon cocked his head and stared at the present he’d been trying to finish wrapping. “I think it looks all right. Sort of.”

“It’s rubbish,” Alisha stated. “Take off the bows.”

Simon did, and the gift miraculously started to resemble a gift again instead of a beribboned tumour. “You should meet her,” he said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“My sister. I’d like you to meet her. I think she’d like you.”

“Is that a good idea? I thought you said Violet was normal and sort of boring.”

“ _You_ said she sounded boring, actually.” He slipped one hand around to the back of her head, drawing their foreheads together and just savouring the closeness of it all for a few moments. “But…I do want that. To introduce you. Is that okay?”

Alisha smiled and slid her arms around him.

The gift ended up abandoned on the countertop for a good long while.

 

*

 

Later, when they’re at Simon’s parents’ place, his little sister will take the gift happily and gauge the shape and probable contents of it right off the bat. Immediately after opening it and doing all the expected squealing and shrieking of a girl who’s just gotten a very warm welcome to age fourteen, she’ll tell her brother he’s pretty all right even though he’s a bit of a fuckup.

Alisha will burst out laughing, unselfconscious, even though she’s only just been introduced to his family.

And Violet will nod with the same old-soul sort of dignity Simon so often exhibits himself. “See,” she’ll say, “your girlfriend knows what’s what.”


End file.
